Martin has said that the best writer of action scenes he has ever encountered is Bernard Cornwell. It’s a scene I’ll remember for a long time. Cornwell at that point has characterized Hook enough for you to feel every little bit of his terror. There’s an incredible sequence in the beginning set in the town of Soissons as the French pillage it our leading man Hook has to survive in a situation that could have him killed in seconds. The viscerality of the violence makes it all the more powerful as sword enters torso or arrow enters eye socket.Ĭornwell doesn’t just thrill you he can also scare the hell out of you. It’s a painful thing whenever a named character meets their end. Hook is no saint, but neither is he a demon he is pleasantly moral at times, and one of his first scenes is him trying to save a woman from the clutches of a malevolent priest.Īnother way this book handles war well is that Cornwell is not afraid to kill characters, even those that you have gotten to know well. That man is Nicholas Hook, a poor conscript from the English countryside who is thrown into something beyond his comprehension. Those two would be more standard main characters in fantasy, but at the actual battle of Agincourt the English archers were perhaps the most hailed of all involved. You can almost smell the viscera of rotting corpses, especially after the battle ends.Ĭornwell made an interesting choice by making his protagonist an archer, rather than a swordsman or knight. Armor does not shine here, and battle is not gallant. One of the things that strikes me about this book is how messy the combat is. And the English fought a war for over a hundred years to rule parts of France. Most of the continent fought a war for thirty years to rule Germany. The Spanish fought a war for eighty years to rule the Netherlands. The truth of the matter is that long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue (and worked many Taino to death as slaves) Europeans were perfectly willing to slaughter each other wholesale for unnecessary reasons. There seems to be a certain consensus on the internet that Europeans were only brutal to their colonial subjects on other continents.
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